January 29, 2010

Mongoloid mtDNA in Imperial-era Italy

A team of researchers announced a surprising discovery during a scholarly presentation in Toronto last Friday. The research team, based at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, has been helping to excavate an ancient Roman cemetery at the site of Vagnari in southern Italy. Led by Professor Tracy Prowse, they’ve been analyzing the skeletons found there by performing DNA and oxygen isotope tests.

The surprise is that the DNA tests show that one of the skeletons, a man, has an East Asian ancestry – on his mother’s side. This appears to be the first time that a skeleton with an East Asian ancestry has been discovered in the Roman Empire.

...

The man with East Asian ancestry may well have been a slave himself. He lived sometime in the first to second century AD, in the early days of the Roman Empire. Much of his skeleton (pictured here) has not survived. The man’s surviving grave goods consist of a single pot (which archaeologists used to date the burial). To top things off someone was buried on top of him - with a superior collection of grave goods.

...

The researchers determined his ancestry by analyzing his mitochondrial DNA – material that is passed down from mother to offspring.

As DNA is passed down from generation to generation there are mutations. People who are related to each other will have similar changes – allowing researchers to put them into broad “haplogroups,” that tend to relate to geographical areas.

This technique has been used to map the spread of humans throughout the world.

The man found in the cemetery has DNA that belongs to what scientists called haplogroup D. “The haplogroup itself has this East Asian origin, it’s not something that’s found in past European populations - the origin of this haplogroup is East Asia,” said Dr. Barta.

61 comments:

Read that yesterday and dismissed as nonsense: mtDNA D is just too common in West Eurasia (and not that common in East Asia south of Siberia or East of Central Asia) as to consider that news article purely amateurish yellow sensationalism. That individual was either from West Asia or East Europe, this last region being one of the main providers of slave workforce in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

"Read that yesterday and dismissed as nonsense: mtDNA D is just too common in West Eurasia (and not that common in East Asia south of Siberia or East of Central Asia) as to consider that news article purely amateurish yellow sensationalism."

I don't know what you have been smoking, Maju, but mtDNA haplogroup D is the most common haplogroup in East Asia (where it accounts for approximately 40% of all Japanese and Tibetan mitochondrial DNA, for example), and it attains its highest average frequency and diversity in East Asia among all world regions, though it is also very common in Central Asia. It is not particularly common in Siberia, where haplogroups C (especially in "Altaic" populations) and G (especially in "Palaeo-Siberian" populations) tend to occur more frequently.

Mitochondrial haplogroup D? Aren't you messing things up with Y-DNA D, which is indeed most important among Japanese and Tibetan?

D has a distribution, AFAIK, very similar to C (or CZ): Northern Eurasia and America.

From Wikipedia:

It is found in Northeast Asia (including Siberia). Its subclade D1 (along with D2 and D4) is one of five haplogroups found in the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the others being A, B, C, and X.

Haplogroup D is also found quite frequently in Central Asia[ref], where it makes up the second most common mtDNA clade (after H). Haplogroup D also appears at a low frequency in northeastern Europe and southwestern Asia.

I know I can commit errors and I normally trust you in this stuff, Ebizur, but in this case, I think it's you who has smoked something... ;)

Checking around: Kivisild 2002 mentions 10/69 Han Chinese were found to belong to mtDNA D. Ok, that's like 15%, about the same as D in Central Asia (31/232) but less than in Turkmens (6/20) or Uyghurs (7/16) (per Comas, link above).

I'm sure that if you check around you'll find many Siberian and NE European populations where mtDNA D is quite common. A week or two ago even a rare mtDNA D individual sample showed up in some other discussion on tribal India. Comas certainly mentions D among Siberians too (and also among Turkish but this is probably a recent arrival from Central Asia).

Whatever the case, imagining that just because some guy had mtDNA D in Roman Age Italy, he was an exotic import from China, is worse than building on thin air: it has all chances of being a the wrong conjecture, as there were many other peoples (including Turks already in the Eurasian steppes) who are much better candidates. To be honest, my first thought were Finns (but it's arbitrary, I know).

I am talking about mtDNA haplogroup D. It must be a coincidence that both Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroup D are predominant among Japanese and Tibetans and both Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroup C are predominant among "Altaic" (and especially Tungusic) populations of Siberia.

According to this data table, at least 37.5% of the authors' large pool of 1312 Japanese (with more than 50% of the samples obtained from individuals in Tokyo and another 25% of the samples obtained from individuals in Aichi Prefecture, particularly in the city of Nagoya) belong to mtDNA haplogroup D. Among the Japanese haplogroup D mtDNAs, haplogroup D4(xD4a, D4b, D4d, D4k, D4n) is the most common designation, accounting by itself for 18.9% of the total pool of Japanese samples. In addition, another 2.13% of the Japanese mtDNAs have been labeled as "G1a1/D," which I assume to mean that, under the resolution of the earlier study or studies from which the data regarding these particular samples have been obtained, it is impossible to determine whether these samples belong to haplogroup G1a1 or rather to haplogroup D.

Haplogroup D mtDNA is much less common in Siberia overall, though it is found fairly frequently in some populations within that vast region (e.g. 8/36 = 22.2% D in a sample of Tuvinians, 12/60 = 20% D4 in a sample of Chukchi, 7/38 = 18.4% D4 in a sample of "Finno-Ugrians" according to the same data table of Tanaka et al.).

Ok. Fair enough. I was aware that Ainu don't have any mtDNA D and that instead this is somewhat frequent north of them.

Regardless, the point is that mtDNA D (unlike, say, F or M7) is a lineage that is relatively common in West Eurasia. I can only think of two such matrilineages with an East Asian origin that are that common on this side of Eurasia: CZ and D. So claiming that the guy in question had "East Asian ancestry" is totally out of place, unless they are thinking in early UP times or something like that or they suddenly decided that Finno-Ugrics and Central Asians are East Asians for the sake of sensationalism.

I have no time in this moment to deepen the question, but I ask: hg.D? Which clade? I think we should have more details. If I remember well this hg. was found among the Etruscans, one of the proof of their origin from Asia Minor. We should exam the papers of Arredi or Vernesi or others. I'll do it this afernoon, after my work.

It has been found a D4g1 (5178A, 16278, 16294 16362 16519, 146) at Murlo, deep Etruria (Achilli A. et al., Mitochondrial DNA Variation of Modern Tuscans Supports the Near Eastern Origin of Etruscans, AJHG, 2007, 759-768) and 2 D at Mimice (Babalini C., The population history of the Croatian linguistic minority of Molise (southern Italy): a maternal view, in EJHG, 2005, 902-912) etc.

I could say as Nolan Admin – Glenn Allen Nolen from “Worldfamilies”: “That’s what these professionals do. Publish! They should just publish the samples and do away with analysis”.

My old great professor of philosophy at Florence University, Giulio Preti, would have said that they are only βάναυσοι.

Maju, you have it all bass ackwards again. Haplogroup D is one of the most common mtDNA haplogroups in present-day Ainu and in prehistoric samples from Hokkaido, alongside haplogroup M7 and haplogroup N9.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, haplogroup D is generally less common among indigenous Siberians than it is among Japanese, Tibetans, etc. The Oroks, a demographically miniscule Tungusic-speaking population of Sakhalin Island, do exhibit an unusually high frequency of mtDNA haplogroup D (68.9% according to Bermisheva et al. 2005), but recent drift and founder effects are very likely in their case. I won't even begin to address your quaint delusions about indigenous peoples of Siberia, but perhaps you should, at the very least, quit talking about mtDNA haplogroup D before you make an even more ridiculous error.

Gioiello, has hg D or any other maternal or paternal mainly Mongoloid, Indian or Negroid hg been detected in any non-Etruscan ancient Italian specimen (not just the Roman era) other than this new find, and in what fraction of the Etruscan and contemporary Italian specimens for each of these three racial groups both maternally and paternally?

Unfortunately we must confide in these βάναυσοι and we haven’t the possibility to confirm or not their analysis. We don’t know the mutations of these mtDNA hg. D, and to say D is to say nothing. There are too many D, which can have been separated from 10, 2o0 30,000 or more years. These D4g1 found in Tuscany has two mutations more than the Japanese D4g1 in HVRI (16294T and 16519C beyond the common 16223T, 16278T and 16362C). Two mutations in HVRI can mean a separation of any thousands of years and on SMGF this haplotype matches only an L3 and we don’t know if this is a D4g1 or an L3: there is the possibility that they have had convergent mutations, anyway it is very rare and perhaps unique. The paper of Babalini has found 1 L1b in Puglia (Italy) and 1 M1 and 1 L2a3 in Croatian Islands or Croatian Italians.In the paper on Etruscans we have L1b, L3d and M1b but only a deep analysis could say if they are of recent immigration (Roman Empire) or from many thousands of years before.

There are those in Turkey who believe that the Etruscans have Turkic origins and that the genetic genetic similarities of the Turks and Etruscans and even Italians are due to the Turkic origins of the Turks and Etruscans (hence even the Italians according to some), not any local Anatolian or West Asian connection!

I have written so many on this argument in other forums and I don't desire to repeat it. If Etruscans came from Aegean Sea (and it isn't said: it could be true also the contrary) anyway the came from there when Turks lived in Central Asia, the place of their origin, more than 2500 years before they arrived to Asia Minor. Anyway modern Turks are genetically at 90% descendants from ancient Anatolians and less than 10% genetically Turks. They superimposed their language, but not their genes. Then Etruscans have probably something to do with ancient Anatolians but not with Asiatic Turks.

NB1There are mutual linguistic influences between 1.2 and 1.3 due to the open geography of Eurasia and Siberia-Alaska junction whereas sahara(for 1.1)and ocean(for 1.4)are barrier against such influences=>this resulted in some overlapping between languages of 1.2 and 1.3 seen best by the Sino-Caucasian,Eurasiatic and Nostratic hypothesis.

NB2Very very little remains of the genetical unity of some language families such as Amerindic and (especially)Australo-Papuanic since the very very long isolation endured by those language families

How could you in so case explain that E1b1a is a negroid hg whereas it's sister sub clade is considered caucasoid by geneticists.

For the languages classification it could be more accurate than the hypothetical Eurasiatic macro-family of Greenberg which group together mongoloid Ainu and Eskimos of the far east with languages such as Greek and Persian ignoring that the common words between these languages are simple loans and that the morphology and grammar of indo-european(inflective,apophonic language with dual and feminine pronouns)is totally different from the morphology and grammar of uralo-altaic languages(agglutinative languages with no apophony,no inflection and no feminine or dual pronouns)but it's almost identical to the grammar and morphology of Semito-Egypto-Berber.

But this could be explained perhaps(with some fantasy)with the Enkidu legacy.

E1b1b isn't entirely considered Caucasoid, only its subclades that have been outside of sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years due to intensive genetic admixture.

I have always tended to agree with the theory of Indo-Europian being closer to Afro-Asiatic than to Uralic or Altaic languages (they are no longer considered as a single group). In addition to the morphological and grammatical relationships you highlighted, the original Indo-Europeans were probably genetically closer to the original Afro-Asiatics than to the original Uralics or Altaics.

Y HG C is found in Greece(Vincenza Battaglia 2008), maybe "Roman" mtdna is correlated with it?We "know" that Greeks are "ancient"..and Romans were crazy about "greek things"...It would be interesting if the Greeks would have take a genetic analysis of the skeletons from Minoan I, graves from Hagios Nikolaos........

Dunno what you're ranting about (again), anaveno. I don't fight battles for mtDNA or R1b or anything of the like: I feel that one of the main problems in finding out the truth is that too many people seem to have preconceptions, biases and ridiculous agendas. Hence I make my best to avoid that.

If I was wrong and someone else was right, then I have to concede. You can call that "a debacle" if you wish but in fact it's a victory (not for me, who could not matter less, but for the truth).

So quit trying to make personal attacks and start discussing facts and opinions like true person. And, please, make an effort to make your confusing babble minimally comprehensible (it's like: "uh, what the heck is this guy talking about?", you know).

"How could you in so case explain that E1b1a is a negroid hg whereas it's sister sub clade is considered caucasoid by geneticists".

As Maju said, 'Lineages are not races or morphotypes. You can perfectly have Y-DNA R1b1b2a1 and be blacker than Mugabe, and you can perfectly have Y-DNA L1 and be whiter than Queen Beth. This is because your the ancestor that gave you that lineage is only one among millions'. And that million ancestors happens just 20 generations back, or 500 years plus or minus (disregarding any possible inbreeding, or shared ancestors). The 'race or morphotype' can be halved with just the first cross, if the other person belongs to a different 'race or morphotypes'.

"For the languages classification it could be more accurate than the hypothetical Eurasiatic macro-family of Greenberg"

Languages are even less closely associated with particular haplogroups.

They are to a great extent. And cases like Y-DNA E1b, R1 or N1c, not to mention the lager clades they belong to, are perfect examples. It may be less common for mtDNA (surely a better indicator of overall ancestry when applied to whole populations, not individuals) but happens too.

There are also combinations of the two, i.e., racial admixture occurring thousands of years ago followed by a genetic assimilation of the lineage into its new race (as in the case of some E1b1b subclades).

"If lineages were ubiquitous or randomly distributed among races, I would agree with you".

Obviously if your million ancestors from 500 years ago have all lived in the same small region for a very long time you will have more chance of carrying a haplogroup common in that particular region. But even in each small region we've finished up with combinations of haplogroups originally from widely separated regions.

But if a member of a new haplogroup arrives and has children with some local his or her children will be likely in turn to have children with locals. The haplogroup remains in the population but it ceases to be associated with the original phenotype. And it can happen on a larger scale. In which case we get 'racial admixture occurring thousands of years ago followed by a genetic assimilation of the lineage into its new race'. Dienekes has even worked hard to dissect the proportions of the original populations in certain modern regional populations.

Obviously if your million ancestors from 500 years ago have all lived in the same small region for a very long time you will have more chance of carrying a haplogroup common in that particular region. But even in each small region we've finished up with combinations of haplogroups originally from widely separated regions.

Exactly. Haplogroups are meaningful (hence give information about race) at community base, not at individual base.

In the same time Turkic shares some lexical similarities with both Indo-European, Uralic(and also Semitic as in Turkic kes=to cut/Semitic qas=to cut)

Perhaps R1's were speaking an agglutinative language close to Turkic and Uralic and when they went south to Arabia(climatic refugium)they underwent some sort of Afro-Asiatic grammatical and lexical sprachbund.

This will explain why Kyrghyzs who are World top R1 are Turkic speaking and Hungarians who are very high in R1 are Uralic speaking.

If you look to R1a distribution a map on wiki

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/GlobalR1a1a.png

you will see that R1a is nearly inexistent in such strong ie regions as Iran,Pakistan and North India whereas there is a big spot in the Turkmen region of Iraq around Kerkuek.

According to linguist Bomhard 318 out of 458 proto ie roots are present in Afro-Asiatic and many others are also present in Turkic and Uralic.For example:proto ie root *kap=to take is identical to Turkish kap=to take.

According to another linguist Turkic is a mix between an altaic substratum and an east iranic superstratum.http://indo-european-migrations.scienceontheweb.net/Iranian_Turkic_Mongolic_correspondences.html

Also according to the Arab linguist Bander Alfraikh(being Arab can not be a reason to dont taking him seriously)

"Proto-Semitic has one important advantage over Indo-European. In Indo-European one works from the known to get to the unknown root. The h of Eng. horn goes to a k and this gives corn. After many gradings to the vowels and discarding with the suffixes you end up with *ker which is not a lexical unit of speech but only a root. In Semitics, especially Arabic, we start from the root ker which was unknown in Indo-European. Ker is a lexical root in Arabic denoting "repetitiveness and circular objects". It appears in such phrases as ker wa far "charge, retreat (warfare)". From the known we go to the unknown to find that the plosive k was changed to a similar consonant q and n added as a suffix just like Eng. to prduce qern "horn". We can go further into the unknown to find qarin "counterpart". This came from the pre-historic practice of yoking an inexperienced bull to a trained bull to do plowing. We could still go to the very unknown, to the etymon of qiran "marriage, which comes from the fact that marriage is union or 'yoking'". This finally takes us to zouj or zoug "spouse". And zoug becomes, through the Comparative Method, the same as the Indo-European root *yeug. Here we moved from the known, which is the "root", to the unknown, which is the "word".

There is also the fact in Comparative Linguistics, as it pertains to Indo-European, to grade the root and make it sometimes zero-grade. Could this be due to an unconscious effort on the part of the corporatist to get to Proto-Semitic which is consonantal (no vowels)? Or is it merely a predetermined effort to make the unknown fit the known? If the former, and if we are interested in language thousands of years before 3000 B.C.E., then Proto-Semitic is a more able candidate to explain the nature of language than Indo-European. It may well lead us to find out some, if not all, of the shortcomings of the Comparative Method. One of these shortcomings, as an example, is the fact that there is no attestation in Indo-European languages on the word sea. If we turn to Semitic languages we find that Eng. mere and Latin mare are descended from Semitic mur "bitter, salty". Mur was used to differentiate sea water from sweat or river water. Sea could have descended from the Semitic root seh(s, heth) signifying motion of water. The heth of seh is hard to pronounce in Germanics and had to go to a vowel, a in this case2."

http://arablexis.com/proto_semitic.html

http://arablexis.com/imgs/img_17.jpg

Some of Turkish/Greek cognatessen/esi/you(sing)siz/esis/you(plural)miz/mas/we

I have cuddled another person from this forum, who had the same analogical way of reasoning. If you go to a Western University to do an exam of glottology you will be expelled by a blow to the bottom. Your words demonstrates only your way of reasoning: racist, obsolete, magic, religious, fundamentalist et cetera et cetera (I have used only Latin words).

Ashraf: people change languages - while they can't change their genes. Languages are not just learned by birth but also because of other social needs.

Languages are primarily a social instrument and that means that, if society changes, languages changes. The many languages that are being lost right now because the offspring of the last speakers just don't need them for anything, not even communicating with their parents anymore, should give you a clue.

All those language families that are extense, are so because there were political expansions in the past, even if at a semi-tribal level of organization, that promoted them. In some cases these expansions may have been associated with some degree of colonization/migration but it doesn't really needs to be a pervasive one, just a socially dominant one, probably by political means.

Furthermore, there has been a recent study that quite clearly finds that the more extended languages/families are also the simplest ones grammatically. Because adult learners tend to ignore a lot of complex grammatical features that are not strictly necessary, causing that simplification or creolization of the languages.

This is true for Indoeuropean, for Turkic, for Afroasiatic, for Chinese and for Niger-Congo: all those language families that have expanded have been creolized in a very drastic manner.

mtDNA is descended from M, which is found in Italy and it is entirely Caucasoid. I wouldnt jump the gun on Mongoloid just because D is common in parts of East Asia. A mongoloid sample in the early days of the Empire may be possible due to the Sino-Roman relations, hence this ambassador or slave(but it is supposedly only half East Asian) idea. I would suspect similar occurrences in Greece, even if the Anatolian Etruscans may of also carried this marker to some degree or East Asian slaves brought back to Greece and Macedon during Alexander and post Alexander times.

Also I wouldnt rule out possible contamination from one of the diggers or scientists involved. But they should also have gotten this skeleton's Y-Chromosome.

Mr Gioiello,(western)Cambridge university which is one of the top ten universities in the world has published Nostratic dictionnary.Please look here belowhttp://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/196512I'm religious but not fundamentalist nor racist or magical.My point is that we can not racially classify Haplotypes,as demonstrated by E1b1b being accepted as caucasoid while it's brother sub-sub-sub clade is considered negroid by geneticists.Arabic,which is the oldest language still in use,has retained case system and dual pronouns of proto lislakh whereas the other languages losted many grammatical features of proto lislakh.Arnaud Fournet which is a western linguist considers indo-european languages as a branch of hamito-semitic and bases his works essentially upon Arabic.

The facts that all alphabets we used derive from proto Arabic ugaritic alphabet,the religions we believe have also the same origin,agriculture,and all prophets originated in the same region,and perhaps langauges spoken by more than 4 billions originated there make me very enthusiastic about that region of the world and Arabic,please dont see this as racism,obsolete or magical as it's difficult to understand for non believers.Also I can't be racist,I have black and mongoloid friends and also black and mongoloid relatives,as skin colour and skull form dont matter anything for us the muslims(or at least it should be so).

And generally speaking we are all brothers and sisters whatever our race,language or religion are as it's said in the coran.

There is no differences between arabe,non arabs,white and blacks except their piosity

Dear Ashraf, I am not contrary to the Nostratic theory or others, being a followers of the monogenetic theory of the language of Alfredo Trombetti. I have often supported also on this forum these theories. I am saying only that your theories are vitiated by religious prejudices. When you’ll use in your comparisons linguistic arguments and not religious prejudices, I’ll be glad to exam seriously your theories.

"the religions we believe have also the same origin,agriculture,and all prophets originated in the same region"

And those reasons account for virtually all the similarities in the languages you mention. They are borrowings.

"Arabic,which is the oldest language still in use"

I think some Australian Aborigines and New Guineans would argue against that idea, not to mention Khoi-San languages. Perhaps you're just refering to written languages. In which case they have all had contact with each other and the above argument applies. It also eplains your observation, 'The facts that all alphabets we used derive from proto Arabic ugaritic alphabet'.

Yah, or Coptic, Basque, Greek, Chinese and virtually every other language around, specially those that have not expanded and hence creolized.

Plus, there's not one Arabic: that's a religious myth. It has been diverging for more than 1300 years in spite of religious obsession for that language. Nothing remains, all changes. Arabic too, of course and how could it be otherwise if so expansive?

That catchphrase of "Arabic is the oldest language still in use" is just one of those repetitive slogans that religious fanatics like to repeat (prayers and "absolute truths" that are not such).

mr Terryt.Semitic and Indo-European have same morphology and grammar and there are common roots between these 2 language families,I say that convinctingly after reading a dozen of linguistic books(one of them is the more than 3000 pages Dolgopolsky Nostratic dictionnary and the voluminous Bomhard's Nostratic macrofamily...)Those common roots are present in the Akkadian language which is attested as old as 3000 bc,and also in Semitic texts in Egypt as old as 2800 bc far a time before monotheism rose,and of course in such ancient languages as Sanskrit,Avestan,Hittite,Gothic,old Celtic,old Hebrew,Coptic,old Greek etc..

But what is more important than common lexical roots is the common morphology and grammar shared by these languages.

As there's not one(spoken)Arabic,there's also not one Turkish,Greek,Castillan,Italian...

But the Arabic used in schools and medias is the same modern standard Arabic first atetsted in its actual form in the 4 th century but it's to some extent intelligible with proto Arabic Ugaritic which dates to 1600 bc.(Ugaritic is the first attested alphabet in the world as proto sinaitic is an abjad and it's the first which uses the current alphabetical order:alp,bayt,gimal,delta...)

The fact that standard modern Arabic is the oldest language still in use(in medias and tought in schools)is a fact.

I'm based on my reading of dozens of western scholars(Renan,Wolfenson,Ehret,Rossi..)

Also if we have the idea to replace Standard modern Arabic by spoken Arabic we will not be able to understand coran and ancient arabic poetry and besides all spoken language are changing constantly so if we make 2000's spoken Arabic(s) the official language,then we will need to redo the same thing with 2500's spoken Arabic(s) as dialects are dynamic.

Addenda et erratum:Shared morphology and grammar between north afro-asiatic and indo-european(please read some books of Hodge,Dolgopolsky,Bomhard and if you know deutsch,you can read the first books working in the subject of afro-asiatic/indo-european genetical relation[both morphologically and lexically]ie the works of Herman Möller and Linus Brünner)For example:ancient Egyptian pt,Akkadian patu,Hebrew pateh,Arabic fatah,Greek petanumi,Latin patere all meaning to open.Yes this could be a borrowing but when such basical words as human bodies in proto north afro-asiatic and proto indo-european organs share also the same roots this can not be due to borrowings.nz/nz=nosenk/unk=neckayk/ok=eyefud/ped=footqf/caput(greek kefali)=headFinally please note that the 458 proto ie roots are not present in all ie branches,for example Greek branch has less proto ie roots than....Semitic!!!

Dolgopolsky explained that fact very well in his Nostratic dictionnary writing that if afro-asiatic would not be considered nostratic then languages as Greek,Sanskrit,Slavic.. can not be considered indo-european!!!

mr MajuAs there's not one(spoken)Arabic,there's also not one Turkish,Greek,Castillan,Italian...etc....

The Latin taught in schools and used in temples till a few decades ago is perfectly intelligible (at least in written form) with the Latin spoken by Caesar and all those old people. In fact, it's the same artificially fossilized language, even if it has not been spoken in the streets since the very days of the late Roman Empire. This is like Sanskrit and modern/historical Indo-Aryan languages, I presume.

I'm pretty sure that in the case of Greek it's a much more direct continuity. Coptic and ancient Egyptian are the very same language. There are heated arguments nowadays because some controversial findings suggest that the Basque spoken in the 3rd century was much like today's Basque and so on.

Your claim is a religious/political cliché and I'd suggest you anyhow to make a comparison at least with Chinese and Greek, both literary languages that clearly pre-date the expansion of Arabic and have more ancient literary forms.

Thank youI could be induced to errors by some books I read even if they seem objective and are written by western scholars(French scholar Petru Rossi for example).And of course you know more about Basque,Latin etc...but for Greek,modern Greek is distinct form ancient Greek.

Anyway,retaining a fossilized language is a chance(to read coran and ancient literary texts)and not a handicap,as languages are constantly changing.

Thousands of years before the fossilized Arabic it was Sumerian to be used from thousands of years as unchanged language. Sumerian wasn’t linked with Semite, probably I think with Sino-Tibetan, and Sumerian was the first language written. Your Semite only developed alphabet from Sumerian or Egyptian. Your claims of supremacy are ridiculous: also your J1 probably arose some thousands of kilometers from Arabia.I don’t know Petru Rossi, but from name and surname he seems a Corse, than an Italian, who are using a Corse name and not the French Pierre.

To the blog owner mr Dienekes:very sorry please delete all the off topics and I will make my best to be a silent blog reader.

Petru Rossi is a French corsican in fact.

I dont claim Semitic superiority because there is no relation between language and accomplishements and dont forget that except Israel(which is somehow European)all the semitic countries belong to the third word,are governed by dictatorships and rely on west for everything.This for the present,as for the past there was many civilisations greater(according to me)than semites=Sumerian,Egyptian.

And is well known that Semitics "made" alphabet from logogrammic hyerogliph.

Also I'am not J1 and my Y-DNA most probably originated in levant,south Anatolia or mesopotamia.

This is the last post here and again sorry as my usual mistake(the same mistakes that caused my ban from dna-forums)is mixing sentiments with science whereas the memebers here discuss scientifically,it's perhaps the fault of our educational system which mix sentiments with science.

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Sad to see so many arrogant queens tarnishing this good blog's integrity trying to enforce their egos one over the other. Ashraf gave us a lesson on humility regardless of how incorrect was all that he said. But when it comes to Gioiello... I'm really sorry, because maybe I'm quite misinformed... Is he one of the incarnations of God?

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